The Sea King’s Daughter by Barbara Micheals (1975) – Occasionally, I have to cleanse my palate with something non-SF/Fantasy. The mother of my children got me hooked on Barbara Micheals (really Elizabeth Peters), and I’ve always enjoyed her novels. With this one, I thought maybe they’d gotten the authors mixed up. Elizabeth Peters wrote her adventure novels under her own name. She wrote her supernatural books under Barbara Michaels, but I was over halfway through this one before anything remotely magical happened. Ms. Peters was […]
Amelia Peabody Goes to Egypt Again
I’ve been trying to always have an audio book available to listen to when I’m in my car. I enjoyed Elizabeth Peter’s first book in her series about Amelia Peabody, so I decided to move on to The Curse of the Pharaohs (1981). The Curse of the Pharaohs begins about three years (I think?) after the ending of the first book. Amelia has married Radcliffe Emerson–her love interest/soul mate from the first book, she’s just recently had a child, and they’ve settled down to a relatively peaceful […]
It’s easier to disregard society’s constraints when you’re rich
As I was looking for more books on CD to listen to in the car, I remembered The Crocodile on the Sandbank (1975) from an earlier Cannonball review. Fortunately there was no wait, and I was soon listening to the adventures of the intrepid Amelia Peabody and her friends in Egypt. Amelia Peabody is a fascinating character, a feisty feminist stifled by the Victorian times of 1884. Fortunately, she is primarily immune from society’s constraints through her independence of mind and means. When her father died, […]
“Love has a most unfortunate effect on the brain”
Narfna‘s recent review of this inspired me to re-read an old favourite. Intrepid Victorian spinster Amelia Peabody travels to Egypt after her father’s death, determined to explore the world and see the treasures she’s read about for so many years. On her way through Rome, she is forced to send her companion home, but meets a lovely young lady in distress, and they strike up an instant friendship. Evelyn Barton-Forbes is the granddaughter of an earl, seduced by a scoundrel and left destitute in Italy. […]
Amelia Peabody, can we be BFFs?
This was SO MUCH FUN. Almost immediately, like after the very first sentence, I was quite enamored with the whole thing. The tone, the characters, the setting, the banter. Amelia is SO SASSY. She’s an example of one of my favorite character types: a person who can afford to disregard the limitations put on her because of some sort of exception or power. It’s delicious, really, watching her come into her own. So basically Amelia Peabody is a “spinster”* in the late 1800s England. Her […]